Democrats have been desperate for Joe Biden to hold nothing back in defining former President Donald Trump as an anti-democratic threat.
On Friday in Pennsylvania, the president did just that.
Biden’s 32-minute speech was a point-by-point takedown of Trump’s actions around the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, three years ago tomorrow. The president lambasted his predecessor as anti-American because of the way he supported the insurrection, called him the “election denier in chief” because of the way he continues to deny he lost the 2020 election, and, in a dig targeted at the image-conscience Trump, called the Republican leader “a loser.”
“Let's be clear about the 2020 election. Trump exhausted every legal avenue available to him to overturn the election. Every one,” Biden said. “But the legal path just took Trump back to the truth: That I’d won the election and he was a loser.”
Biden added: “We all know who Donald Trump is. The question we have to answer is, who are we? That’s what’s at stake.”
The speech, which Biden aides have cast as the opening salvo in the president’s race against the expected Republican nominee in 2024, sets up an extraordinary moment in presidential politics where the current officeholder, in his bid to keep the job, is questioning his predecessor’s commitment to democracy ahead of their expected rematch.
Democrats have publicly and privately urged Biden to repeatedly deliver this kind of message, questioning Trump’s commitment to American democracy and positioning the election as a stark, but simple, choice between him and Trump.
“He’s resetting the terms of the debate, as he needs to,” said Democratic strategist Christy Setzer.
With polls showing Biden trailing the former president across the country and in key battleground states, many Democrats – some of whom have grown nervous about the president’s reelection – have argued it is time for Biden to deliver on his most persistent political mantra: “Don't compare me to the Almighty, compare me to the alternative.”
President Joe Biden speaks during a campaign event at Montgomery County Community College January 5, 2024 in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania. In his first campaign event of the 2024 election season, Biden stated that democracy and fundamental freedoms are under threat if former U.S. President Donald Trump returns to the White House. Drew Angerer/Getty Images
This speech was filled with comparisons between the current president and his predecessor. Biden argued Trump’s campaign was a self-centered endeavor – “Trump's campaign is about him. Not America. Not you,” the president said – while he said his campaign was “different” and called protecting democracy the “central cause of my presidency. While Biden recalled attending the funerals of police officers who died as a result of events on Jan. 6, he blamed Trump’s lies for those deaths.
“They died because these lies brought a mob to Washington,” he said. “He promised it will be wild and it was. He told the crowd to fight like hell. And all hell was unleashed.”
The speech was also loaded with body language. Biden spoke through gritted teeth about Trump disparaging deceased military members as “suckers.” The Catholic rosary on his wrist shook with his fist. He shouted, pointed at the audience, and seemed passionate and angry.
“I'll say what Donald Trump won’t: Political violence is never ever acceptable in the United States political system, never, never never,” Biden said. “It has no place in a democracy. None. You can't be pro-insurrectionist and pro-American.”
The speech comes as a perilous moment for American democracy. Recent polling around the Jan. 6 anniversary has found Republicans are more sympathetic to what happened at the Capitol in 2021 than they were years ago and while some Republicans censured Trump in the wake of the attack on the Capitol – a fact Biden brought up – the former president has not only survived those attacks, he has deepened his hold on the Republican base and forced many of his party’s top elected officials to retreat from the criticism they leveled years earlier.
The Trump campaign’s response to Biden’s speech highlighted the difficulty the former president may have responding to these attacks in 2024. Instead of taking on Biden’s criticism that Trump is a threat to democracy for what happened around the 2020 election, Trump’s top aides and supporters questioned why Biden was talking about the issue at all. And his campaign tried to turn the attack around by claiming the former president’s legal jeopardy makes Biden “the greatest threat to democracy the United States of America has ever faced.”
“The bottom line today is that Joe Biden has given up on running an issues-based campaign for 2024,” wrote Jason Miller, a top Trump adviser. “Rather than help those suffering from Bidenomics or our porous southern border, Biden plans on weaponizing government against his leading political opponent.”
In a tweet highlighting increased inflation, Miller added: “Biden sure doesn’t want to talk Bidenomics.”
That response will likely only embolden Democrats who would like Biden to talk more about Trump.
“I have told anyone who would listen [at the White House] that he needs to be relentless about defining Trump and also punching him in the face,” said one Democratic strategist close to the Biden administration. “Today he did all of that. And he needs to keep doing more.”
Josh Schwerin, a Democratic strategist who worked on Hillary Clinton’s campaign against Trump in 2016, echoed Biden’s “don’t compare me” mantra, saying the speech represented “a powerful reminder” that this election is a choice between Biden and Trump.
“When that fact is internalized more broadly by voters, we’re going to see numbers move in Biden’s direction,” Schwerin said on the recent polling.
Democratic strategist Adam Parkhomenko called the speech “one of the most powerful speeches of my lifetime.”
“There's no shortage of Democrats who often wet their bed wondering if President Biden is the right choice for them to get behind,” said Parkhomenko. “And this is exactly the kind of speech that puts those thoughts and very siloed efforts to rest.”